


The More Deadly of the Species

by IrenaK



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Gen, Villain Protaganist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 15:26:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13103097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IrenaK/pseuds/IrenaK
Summary: The first thing she ever kills is a rat.





	The More Deadly of the Species

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wneleh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wneleh/gifts).



> For wneleh: may your holidays be even happier than a sociopath with access to military-grade weaponry.

The first thing she ever kills is a rat.

She leaves out some old cheese, sprinkled liberally with arsenic taken from the gardener’s woodshed. It takes time for a rodent to appear, clever, cautious creatures that they are, but Isabel is an even more patient girl and eventually the presence of easy and free food is too much to resist.

The rat only consumes half the hunk before it starts to hack, dancing in a funny little circle, figure eights and loop-de-loops. It vomits and Isabel never knew such a small creature had so much in it, fascinating really. But finally, the rat has nothing left, neither bile nor blood, and it stumbles away from the sick, makes it perhaps half a meter, then defecates on itself and dies.

She wonders what will happen to the neighbor’s yappy little dog if she feeds it the same thing.

***

Her mother brushes her hair, murmuring a tune in her native Spanish. Isabel believes she is ready to wear her locks off her neck, but her mother leaves it to hang over her shoulders, lush and dark and curled just so.

“But why can’t it be in a bun, Mama?” she asks. “Like yours?”

“Hush, Isabel,” Mama says, smile genuine in a face marred by bruising around her left eye. “You’ll grow into it soon enough.”

***  
  
The dog gets sick, but doesn’t die.

She is disappointed, but now she knows: the bigger the animal, the larger the dose needed for the optimal outcome.

***  


Her father eats his pudding, gobbling it down like the pig he is. It takes longer than she expects for him to start choking on nothing, gasping and flailing and turning red, blue, purple and falling down, down, down.

Her mother screams and rushes to his side and Isabel can’t help but feel a little contempt for her. He is the engineer of his own destruction; if he had been a better father, a better husband –

\- _if her mother had been strong enough to do it herself_ -

\- then Isabel would have had no need to act.  She will not mourn him, even as he reaches for her, his only child, watching him with cold, dark eyes.

He is the first man she kills. She finds it rather similar to killing rats.

***  


Their sitting room faces the South, letting in light at almost all times of day. Her mother likes to relax by the window as she reads or sews or entertains the men who wish to court her now that her husband is dead and her mourning period has passed. There are many in the first few months, but fewer and fewer as time marches ever on.

She has Isabel sit beside her, gathering her hair up and pinning it back into a bun, neat and tidy.

“Oh, darling girl,” Mama sighs. “Never grow old and never lose your looks.”

***  
  
Her studies often disinterest her – who cares why the Italians lost their empire or Bismark reconciled with the Catholics – but she throws herself into the sciences with a passion that surprises many (“Ice water in that child’s veins,” she once hears her mother’s maid tell the old valet).

But, oh, chemistry, what a perfect discipline it is, the way one may take different elements, rearrange them, build them up, create whole new matters out of them. It is the science of creation and she imagines that, should there be a God, this is rather how He might have felt as He shaped Eden out of nothing or wiped the world clean with flood and fire.

***  


The first man she ever sleeps with is nineteen years her senior and has a twisted mass of tissue running along his right shoulder blade, a souvenir from a long ago burn. He does not have full movement in the corresponding arm, but that does not limit the talent in his fingers.

“Lovely girl,” he murmurs, dipping in between her legs, teasing her opening and pressing his thumb into her sensitive clit. “So very, very lovely.”

 _No_ , she thinks, hand rubbing over and over that scar, nails biting into it as she comes. _You are_.

***  


The University of Zurich welcomes her when Berlin will not, rejecting her on sex alone, no matter how talented she is, no matter how high her marks are (far higher than most of the men who gain admittance, certainly).

She enjoys it at first. She is not the only Prussian woman there, so is not much of an oddity, and the men, for once, pay attention to her words instead of her mouth.

But, no, it turns out, it is her mouth they prefer after all, what it may do for them, what pleasure it may yet spill forth, what secretes it may betray to be used against her.

One of her classmates falls ill. He ends up in the hospital, wheezing and desperate for breath (he will live, after a fashion, for another seven years, beset by weak lungs and terrible fits).

She visits his sick bed – so kind to do so, the nurses tell her, he’s had so little company – and leans over him. She lets her mouth form her words.

“You shouldn’t have stolen from me.”

No one proves a thing, no one even mentions the idea of a thing in front of her, but the other students steer well clear of her after that.

***  
  
She receives a doctorate, but no laboratory is interested in her work, in her methodology or her theories. They complain of her merits, of her purpose, of the way she wastes animals in her experiments (which is a laughable insult when the damn Russian and his surgically-deformed dogs is awarded a Nobel).

But this is perhaps where she finds a bit of luck in her circumstance. Her mother has finally married again and married well, for a fortuitous rail accident ensures she also outlives her second and far wealthier husband. This means both she and Isabel now have a tidy sum at their disposal to do with as they see fit.

Her mother moves to the countryside and will die a quiet death there in 1921.

Isabel takes her funds and opens her own private lab, to be run, administered and used solely by her. She hires a body man to handle the paperwork and the bank and any contact she may be forced to have with the outside world, but is otherwise content to putter away on her experiments and publish her findings under a pseudonym.

The world starts to take her work seriously, but she will not know how seriously until the Great War descends upon them all.

***  
  
Ludendorff makes no announcement when he calls upon her, no note, no letter or telegram, simply appearing amongst her beakers and test tubes one day, silver-haired and straight-backed.

He presents her with her own words, an article on the effects of sulfur mustard on human epidermis.

“This is your work,” he says. It is not a question, despite the author attribution to one Fritz Immerwahr.

“And what if it is?”

He smiles. It sends a delicious shiver down her spine.

“Then, my dear lady, your Kaiser has need of your services.”

***  
  
Her new lab puts her old one to shame, the entirety of Germany’s war machine turned toward the goal of discovering new and more effective ways of killing its enemies.

She wonders how she was ever satisfied with her little solitary life before.

***  
  
When she wakes in the hospital, her face feels both pulled apart and numb, a disorienting sensation. Ludendorff looks at her with something approaching sympathy.

“There was an accident,” he says.

“Let me see,” she tells him and holds out a hand until a mirror is placed in it.

The chemical exposure has twisted her face, from the left side of her mouth up the entirety of her cheek. Neither the healing nor scarring is complete, but she is already certain that it will leave her with a ghastly, death head’s grin.

 _Lovely girl_ , she thinks and smiles on the inside.

***  
  
The war doesn’t go well and the Kaiser is weak, like her mother.

***  
  
She thought once she knew what God felt like. Looking into the eyes of the Goddess towering over her, incandescent in Her rage, one of Germany’s great industrial weapons held aloft above them both, Isabel for once realizes how wrong she was.

Perhaps it is fitting she will die here, as Ludendorff’s body grows cold and the remains of her greatest works burn around her.

***  
  
The Goddess shows her mercy.

She will never understand why.

***  
  
She sits in a café in Lisbon, sipping on some truly terrible coffee and contemplating the paper before her. The National Socialists’ coup in Munich has failed and its leaders have been jailed, but there is something in the air again, the slow rumbling of that terrible purpose Europe had thought dead since Armistice Day.

Her fingers twitch. She needs paper, needs to get back to work.

“Oh my, you don’t mind if I sit here, do you dearie?”

The voice of an Englishwoman draws her from her thoughts. Isabel looks up into a kind, round face surrounding by messy red curls. She tilts her head at the free chair across the table and shrugs.

“Ta.”

Isabel returns to her paper, only listening with half an ear to the woman ordering a tea in poorly accented Portuguese. She idly takes another sip of coffee, frowns at the aftertaste and sets it aside.

“Oh, don’t mind me staring, love, but were you in the war?” Isabel glares at the question, but the Englishwoman seems impervious to her irritation. “It’s just with the –“ she draws a circle in the air over the left side of her face – “and you heard such terrible things from men on the front. Can’t imagine anyone on the continent escaping unscathed, even if they weren’t fighting.”

Isabel finds her throat closing up unexpectedly, a little shocked at her own reaction. Surely she's never had any such sentimentality before. She nods.

“Yes, I thought so,” the Englishwoman says, nodding. “Terrible business. Lost more than a few men to the gas, we did.”

Isabel tries to draw a breath but comes up short.

“A good friend of mine actually died that way.”

She should be able to breathe, _why can’t she breathe?_

“Good friend, good man.”

Her vision begins to darken around the edges, haloing the Englishwoman into the sole bright spot in a tunnel of darkness.

“Truth is,” the Englishwoman says with a little sigh. “War may be a man’s affair, but poison’s always been the preferred business of women.”

Isabel falls and watches the world disappear.


End file.
